Member's Off-site Blogs

our sadistically made food...

Chickens raised for slaughter are bred to grow three times faster than normal. Many die from heart attacks. Some starve to death because their infant legs can’t carry their adult bodies to feed. Sows spend much of their lives pregnant, giving birth in tight steel cages with concrete floors.

Of the animals we eat, which have the worst lives? It’s hard to tell; we’re not them. But what we do know is that cattle and sheep – red-meat contributors to human diets – in the main graze freely in open paddocks, sun on their backs.

And here’s another certainty – we are increasingly shunning their meat. A consequence of this is more suffering to more animals. What type of suffering and how animals experience it is open to endless debate. Consumption patterns aren’t.

A study published last year by researchers at Griffith Business School, Griffith University, showed that by 2011 mutton consumption had been “almost wiped out”. Chicken and pork had trebled and doubled their market shares over the past 50 years at the expense of beef, lamb and mutton, whose prices had risen quicker than white-meat counterparts. Australians these days consume about 111 kilograms of meat a year, including 33kg of beef, 9kg of lamb, 25kg of pork and 43kg of chicken. This is nearly three times the international average.

While lamb and beef have become luxury foods, chicken and pork are cheap and plentiful. When we eat bigger beasts, fewer animals get hurt. But what happens when chicken and pork dominate our diets?

Animals Australia’s communications director Lisa Chalk says that due to the scale of the industry, “the situation for chickens raised for meat is among the most dire”. Of the more than 500 million chickens raised annually in Australia for food, she says, the industry itself factors in a 4 per cent loss before slaughter. “That’s over 20 million birds a year who die because of their fast growth rate and living conditions,” Ms Chalk says.

Going "organic" eating gives a better chance of getting more humanely grown and slaughtered food. It could be more expensive, though the portion size of "organic" food don't need to be as big as non-organic factory food. The taste of "organic" chicken is far superior to that of intensive chook farms and far more satisfying in smaller quantity.

The industry of consumerism want us to consume more quantity rather than for us to be more aware of quality. This is why the industry of consumerism is pushing things like GM crops, supersized cool drinks and other one-knows-what vat-grown proteins substances that can feed us but the present result from these, in obesity, diseases and other ailments are slowly killing us.